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US airlines to halt Northeast flights

Published on NewsOK
Modified: February 8, 2013 at 7:18 pm •
Published: February 8, 2013

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Two flights to Boston are listed as canceled at Philadelphia International Airport, Friday, Feb. 8, 2013, in Philadelphia. Airlines have already canceled more than 2,700 Friday flights as they get ready for a storm that threatens to dump up to 3 feet of snow from New York City to Boston. Flight-tracking website FlightAware shows 728 cancellations at the three big airports in the New York area. Another 191 flights to or from Boston have been scrubbed, and 137 in Toronto. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

As any frequent traveler knows, during a bad storm, the fastest route from, say, New York to Minneapolis may be through Atlanta, or Salt Lake City. Airline workers are adept at finding such routes manually. The new Delta system looks for such "creative routings" automatically and sends a message to the traveler telling them about their new flight, Delta Air Lines Inc. CEO Richard Anderson said on an employee hotline message last week.

"We need the ability to use automation to figure out for our passengers the quickest and fastest way to (re-accommodate) them on Delta or other carriers," he said. "Our goal is to get them to their destination as promptly as possible."

More than any other airline, JetBlue Airways Corp.'s route network is centered around the East Coast. Its meteorologist gives JetBlue executives a rolling seven-day forecast, and by Thursday it was canceling flights that had been planned for Friday. It has scrubbed 640 flights scheduled for Friday and Saturday.

Waiting too long to cancel flights means "customers are headed for the airport, they're in their cars, they get to the airport and if your flight's canceled that's when bad things start to happen from a customer standpoint," said Rob Maruster, Jet Blue's chief operating officer.

The snow was snarling air travel in Canada, too, with 240 flights canceled on Friday at Pearson International Airport in Toronto. Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips said Toronto hasn't seen a snowfall exceeding 5 inches since Dec. 19, 2008. The current storm was expected to dump up to 11 inches of snow as it moves along.